Free Republic

While we constantly analyze short-term data, the industry has a longer-term problem. And it is not related to what lies below the ground. There is a retirement tidal wave that could wash over the oil and gas industry over the next few years. The seeds of this crisis were planted in the late 1980’s after the last major oil bust. Oil prices crashed after Saudi Arabia became fed up with losing market share, and beginning around 1986, it pumped flat out in order to force out other producers. The price of oil crashed and a lot of US drillers cut...

Twenty-seven senators want President Obama to block federal agencies and contractors from asking job applicants about prior criminal convictions. The senators, including 26 Democrats and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), want Obama to take executive action to "ban the box," referring to a question on job applications that asks if an applicant has any convictions. "We ask you to require federal contractors and agencies to refrain from asking job applicants about prior convictions until later in the hiring process," they said in a letter to Obama on Monday. "This policy would eliminate unnecessary barriers to employment for all job...

Earlier we reported that all the jobs added in April were part-time, or over 400,000, while full-time jobs decreased by over 200,000 pushing them further under the pre-recession peak. Here is another stunning data point: while it has been no secret that ever since the quote-unquote recovery virtually all job gains have gone to older workers, those 55 and over and ever closer to retirement, April merely confirmed this demographically disastrous trend, and of the 255K workers added in the household survey when broken down by age group, more than all, or 266K went to workers aged 55 and older...

A new report released by the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) says that only 16 percent of 15- to 17-year-old teens in Baltimore have been raised in an intact, married family. The report, released Wednesday and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is “one of the five least intact counties of America,” along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn. The report cites studies indicating that children who grow up in intact, married families are...

When he came to office, not unlike other politicians, Obama made many promises. Nearly every promise he made has remained unfulfilled — with one exception: The promise that “change has come to America.” My dad used to tell me that nothing was so good it could not be better or be so bad it could not get worse. Things have indeed gotten worse, much worse, and it would appear that there is no bottom as to how far we may ultimately fall at the hands of an administration and politicians from both sides of the aisle, who only care about...

Folks, there is exactly one way you're going to put a stop to this sort of nonsense: At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015. Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room,...

Wisconsin ranks 40th in the nation for job growth, or so says a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Many in the media and political circles pounced on the release as evidence that the policies of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a potential presidential candidate, have left the Badger State trailing much of the nation. But the report failed to give sufficient context to Wisconsin’s job growth. The BLS, along with other reports touting similar results, ranked states based on how much private employment increased over a year. Why might Wisconsin’s employment increase seem modest? One reason could be that more...

Rising immigration from the 1820s to the Civil War drove down wages for free black Americans and immigrants alike. Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert's macroeconomic history shows that between 1816 and 1856, the American Northeast was transformed from the "Jeffersonian ideal" to a society more typical of developing economies with marked income inequality and very low wages for laborers. As badly as new immigrants often were treated by established Americans, even worse treatment was meted out to black Americans by the immigrants. Organizing themselves into trade unions, immigrant laborers helped set the terms of hiring at many urban workplaces. Not...

Employers in 31 U.S. states cut jobs last month as weak economic growth weighed on hiring and a slowdown in oil and gas drilling caused big job losses in some states. The Labor Department said Tuesday that unemployment rates rose or were unchanged in 27 states and fell in 23 states. Eighteen states gained jobs, while employment was unchanged in Idaho.

Commentary By Portrait of Patrick Tyrrell Patrick Tyrrell There was good news this month: private-sector job openings rose slightly in February, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Openings rose to 3.8 percent of all private-sector jobs and the job openings—the highest rate since January 2001. Other data for the month showed the unemployment rate for workers age 25-54 (often called prime age workers) ticked downward to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent.

In a jaw-dropping move Monday afternoon, Dan Price, the 30-year-old founder of Gravity Payments, a credit card processing company in Seattle, Washington, announced to his 120-person staff that over the next three years, every single employee — even the lowest paid clerk — will be paid a minimum annual salary of $70,000. And he wasn't joking. "My jaw just dropped," Phillip Akhavan, 29, who earns $43,000 working on the company's merchant relations team, said in an interview with The New York Times. "This is going to make a difference to everyone around me." The announcement stunned the staff and triggered...

If the raccoon coat-wearing youth of the 1920s really were the lost generation, what would you call millennials? Generation Opportunity, “a national, non-partisan youth advocacy organization,” crunched the employment and unemployment data for March in its Millennial Jobs Report for March 2015” and found that: • “The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29-year-olds, which adjusts for labor force participation by including those who have given up looking for work, is 13.9 percent (NSA). The (U-3) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds is 9.1 percent (NSA). • “The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.842 million young adults...

The March monthly jobs report released on Friday actually shares two striking similarities with Easter (hint: jellybeans are not one of them). One similarity is that, in each case, our attention is often focused on the wrong things. The labor market headlines, as usual, are focused on job growth and the unemployment rate. Employers added just 126,000 jobs in March, which, together with a reduction of 69,000 in the job creation estimates for January and February, suggests that the pace of recovery is slower than previously thought. Nevertheless, with unemployment rate steady at 5.5 percent — just fractions of a...

SEATTLE -- Reaction continues to pour in over Seattle's new minimum wage law. Some business owners in Seattle say the increase to $11 an hour will force them to make drastic changes. Many in the local restaurant industry say the next few weeks and months will give them a better idea of the real impact under the new law. Some bosses have already been forced to make tough decisions to protect the bottom line. At Icon Grill in downtown Seattle, all employees will now only get one week of paid time off. Some employees who've worked at the restaurant for...

Benefits and welfare schemes are often blamed for making people less likely to want to work. But a study has found that the opposite may be true. A Europe-wide survey of 19,000 people revealed that the more a country paid to the unemployed or sick, and invested in employment schemes, the more likely its residents were to want a job.

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor ‎force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000 – 35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs–a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022. While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful;...

It highlights the huge gap between Obama’s promise that his progressive, big-government economic policies would jump-start the economy, and the hard reality of America’s complex society and economy. The failure of Obama-economics was highlighted March 28, when the federal government admitted that the economy grew only 2.2 percent in 2014. ... Since 2009, the U.S. population has grown from 305 million to 321 million, including 11 million illegals. ... Even as he doubles down on his high-regulation, high-immigration policies, Obama insists that his top priority is increasing wages. ... But he’s continuing to rapidly add immigrants to the nation’s flooded...

Senate Republicans are renewing efforts to learn why Huma Abedin, a top assistant to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was allowed to keep working at the agency under a special, part-time status while also being employed at a politically-connected consulting firm. The new requests are being made by Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, following revelations that both women used a private Internet server and email accounts for State Department correspondence. Grassley says the earlier requests to the department have been largely ignored, ~snip~ Grassley’s probe started in 2013, when he requested all communications between...

Our social media manager asked our followers on Facebook whether they are better off today than before Barack Obama took office and, more precisely, passed Obamacare. Their answers leave little room for doubt about the negative effects of this president’s horrendous policies: [FB POST] ... So how about you? Are you better off because of Obamacare, or do you agree with 99% of our Facebook followers who say that Obamacare has been “a disaster” for the country and for themselves? Let us know, here in the comment section and on Facebook!

The costs of providing health insurance are staggering under the ACA: Small businesses, which are the least able to handle cost increases, report paying an average of $11,868 more per employee per year since the ACA’s passage. Large companies have also seen their costs increase. As a result, some of them have cut employee hours to avoid triggering the coverage requirement altogether. Nor is this only happening in the private sector. Public school systems from coast to coast have been effected. K-12 districts have limited hours for their support staff, including janitors, drivers, cafeteria workers, and teachers. As one school...